Painting Fakes

Here's a little parable about plants.  In particular, a little row of street trees that I often walk past, just a few hundred metres from my home. I'm no botanist, but I believe these are Golden Penda trees, scientific name Xanthostemon chrysanthus.  They are Queensland natives but their natural range doesn't extend as far south as Brisbane. They are here because they were the official plant of Expo 88, planted in flower to provide visitors with a vibrant golden welcome.   The thing about these trees is that they love to grow.  What first attracted me to them was the way the foliage was starting to sprout from the base of the trees.  At the end of last autumn you could see that the growth was already strong. As I went out walking in the streets around my home I started watching the growth of these exuberant little sprouts.  Over a period of a few months last summer they went crazy, growing from modest little shoots to large new growths. Last summer was...

It's easy to criticise governments, but hard to be one.  How do you solve the pressing problems facing our world, in the face of powerful forces that don't want them solved and a population fed on distraction and disinformation?  This dilemma means, as I have been saying in various ways on this blog for some years now, that our problems won't be solved by electing the right government, they will only be solved by each of us working hard to change course and take our governments along with us. Sometimes this appears a forlorn hope but plenty of activists encourage us not to give in to this sort of despair.  Recently I reviewed Rebecca Solnit's lovely book, Hope in the Dark ,  in which she shows that despite what we might think, the activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have had a surprising amount of success.  We should celebrate this success, and keep working to achieve more. Tim Hollo points us in a slightly different direction in his new book, Li...

I've somehow missed out on knowing anything about American writer and activist  Rebecca Solnit until this year, when a chance social media post referenced something she said.   My starting point has been her little book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,  first published in 2005 and re-issued with some more recent material in 2016.  She was writing in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and George W Bush's re-election to the US presidency.  There was a lot of despair around.  The massive peace movements in the US and UK opposing the invasion had seemed powerful, but the invasion went ahead anyway and both Bush and Blair were returned to power in their subsequent elections.  Were they all wasting their time, was the world doomed? I remember the time well.  Bush, Blair and Howard all pushed the line that the Iraqis had 'weapons of mass destruction' (which it turned out they didn't), and even hinted that they were harbouring A...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dirty little secret of the Stolen Generation and the valiant efforts of the late Archie Roach to bring it to our attention.  Since then I've been reading about the even darker and dirtier secret that came before that - the fact that the British colonisation of Australia, and in particular my home state of Queensland, was accomplished through the use of deadly force against its original custodians.   This is not a pleasant or a pretty tale and there is really no fair way to soften it.  In his book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times , published in 2013, historian Timothy Bottoms quotes an estimate that at the time of the first British encroachment into what became Queensland - the establishment of the convict settlement in Brisbane in 1826 - there were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people living here.  By the end of the century there were only about 20,000 First Nations people left.  He ...

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the deat...

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice....